In Kennedy, the Last Roar of the New Deal Liberal

“AN important chapter in our history has come to an end,” Barack Obama said in his first public remarks on the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time.”

What Mr. Obama didn’t say — and perhaps didn’t need to — was that the closed chapter was the vision of liberalism begun by the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, extended during the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson and now struggling back toward relevance. It holds that the forces of government should be marshaled to improve conditions for the greatest possible number of Americans, with particular emphasis on the excluded and disadvantaged. It is not government’s only obligation, in this view, but it is the paramount one.

No major political figure of the past half-century was so deeply invested in this idea as Mr. Kennedy was. It underlay the staggering number of bills he created or sponsored in his long Senate career, whether in medical care or education, on behalf of immigrants or labor unions. And it underlay Mr. Kennedy’s crusade for universal health care — “a right, not a privilege,” as he declared at the Democratic National Convention last August.

The belief in government as the guardian of opportunity and advancement is not a complicated one, but it is fraught with ambiguities — including the risks incurred when government grows too large and also too expensive. Indeed, the peak years of Mr. Kennedy’s Senate career, the 1980s and ’90s, coincided with the ascendancy of a countervision, captured in Ronald Reagan’s assertion: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

In that period, many Democrats began to rethink the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. Many distanced themselves from “the L word.” And Mr. Kennedy appeared out of step. As the authors of “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” observe, “Even in his own party, his liberalism had seemed, at times, outmoded as the ‘third way’ of the Clintons gained ascendance in the Washington of the 1990s.”

So too in 2008 the party’s top presidential contenders dependably referred to themselves as “progressives.”

Still, Mr. Kennedy was unwavering. It is hard to imagine any contemporary Democrat taking the podium as Mr. Kennedy did last summer in Denver to reprise the celebrated oration he had made at the 1980 convention in New York. But Mr. Kennedy did — without apology. The passage of time, and the reordered political landscape, had not obscured his causes or dimmed his rhetoric.

His roots in old-fashioned liberalism went deep. Like his brothers, he was reared in the towering shadow of President Roosevelt, who was first elected president in 1932, the year Edward Kennedy was born.

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Illustration by John Ritter; Photographs by Jamie Rose for The New York Times (Kennedy) and George Skadding/Time & Life Pictures - Getty Images (crowd)

But the older Kennedy brothers drifted away from New Deal politics. John F. Kennedy stood at the center of a new post-ideological pragmatism. In 1962, the year Edward Kennedy was first elected to the Senate, President Kennedy asserted that while “most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint — Republican or Democrat, liberal, conservative or moderate,” in reality the most pressing government concerns were “technical problems, administrative problems” that “do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past.”

Robert F. Kennedy, in contrast, was drawn to passionate movements, but his devotions could shift with the political winds. An anti-Communist in the 1950s — when he worked briefly on the staff of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy — Robert later embraced the “New Politics” of the late 1960s, with its strong flavor of anti-establishment protest. In the 1968 election he seemed to be simultaneously courting militant leftists and aggrieved white ethnics stirred by the populist demagoguery of the segregationist George Wallace.

It was Edward, the youngest brother, whose “true compass” — to borrow the title of his forthcoming memoir — pointed unerringly toward New Deal liberalism. He became its champion for the remainder of his life.

This earned him a reputation for being the populist Kennedy, gifted with the common touch. Certainly he enjoyed politics at the retail level — plunging into the crowd, shaking hands.

But Mr. Kennedy’s accomplishments in the political arts were mixed. He excelled at stumping for others, as he did in his brothers’ presidential campaigns. And he performed impressively for Mr. Obama in 2008. Just before the deluge of primaries in early February, when the contest between Mr. Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton was tight, Mr. Kennedy drew large crowds in California and New Mexico, where shouts of “Viva Kennedy” greeted his visits to the barrios.

But on other occasions Mr. Kennedy faltered. His intemperate denunciation of Judge Robert H. Bork in 1987 helped poison the atmosphere of Supreme Court appointments up to the present day.

His one signal talent was for legislation, the painstaking, glacial business of shaping bills and laws. He learned at the feet of Senate giants like Richard Russell, who had also been a mentor to another superb legislator, Lyndon Johnson.

The friction between Mr. Kennedy’s uncertain feel for politics and his instinctive command of governance led to his gravest miscalculation, his ill-executed attempt to unseat his party’s incumbent president, Jimmy Carter, in the 1980 primaries.

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PIVOT POINT A vanquished Senator Edward M. Kennedy shaking hands with the victor, President Jimmy Carter, at the Democratic convention at Madison Square Garden in 1980.Credit
John Ritter

“No real difference of politics separated Kennedy from Carter,” Theodore H. White noted when he revisited the episode in 1982.

Mr. White, curious to grasp the motives behind this quixotic mission, pressed Mr. Kennedy about it. At first Mr. Kennedy haltingly mentioned Mr. Carter’s failed leadership and squandered opportunities. But when prodded further, he delivered “a stunning discussion of just how laws are passed, of how Carter’s amateur lobbyists had messed up program after program by odd legislative couplings of unsorted programs,” Mr. White wrote. “Then, details cascading from him more and more rapidly, he concluded in an outburst of frustration” that Mr. Carter was incompetent. “Even on issues we agree on, he doesn’t know how to do it,” Mr. Kennedy told Mr. White, who likened his attitude to “the contempt of a master machinist for a plumber’s assistant.”

The paradox was that by challenging Mr. Carter, Mr. Kennedy weakened him in the general election, and thus assisted in the victory of Mr. Reagan, who promptly ushered in the conservative counterrevolution, founded on distrust of government, that Mr. Kennedy spent the next three decades battling, losing as often as he won.

The literary critic Lionel Trilling once wondered why so many liberal intellectuals he knew seemed unnerved by any mention of death. Might it be, he speculated, because death was, “in practical outcome, a negation of the future and of the hope it holds out for a society of reason and virtue?”

Mr. Trilling had in mind the “progressives” of the 1930s and ’40s, who were lit with utopian dreams and intoxicated, in many instances, by the Soviet “experiment.”

Mr. Kennedy’s liberalism had its basis in something different — New Deal meliorism, with its hopeful spirit of reform.

And he brought to it in its later stages a quality of chastened knowledge, the hardiness of the survivor. Mr. Kennedy was, of course, uniquely versed in the concrete facts of death. All three of his brothers died young, two slain by assassins’ bullets. And for 40 years he bore the guilt of the death he caused in Chappaquiddick in 1969.

Becoming “the greatest senator of our time” could not atone for this. Nor could it redress Mr. Kennedy’s many other trespasses — the boozing and womanizing and the suffering it brought.

But if the art of governance did not redeem Mr. Kennedy, it irradiated him, and the liberalism he personified. At a time when government itself had fallen into disrepute Mr. Kennedy applied himself diligently to its exacting discipline, and wrested whatever small victories he could from the machinery he had learned to operate so well. Whether or not his compass was finally true, he endured as the battered, leaky vessel through which the legislative arts recovered some of their lost glory.